C Programming Language
Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie
Pearson Education; International Ed edition (24 Sep 2004)
ISBN-10: 0582894557
ISBN-13: 978-0582894556
274 pages
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About:
The C Programming Language
- Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie It is difficult to avoid cliches when talking about this book - it is just so good, that one can't help heaping superlatives on it. This book is affectionately known as 'K & R', after the names of the authors, and it is almost definitely the most widely respected of all books on any given programming language. This is the book that introduced the 'Hello World!' program to the world :-), which is now practically a standard first program in any introductory book on any programming language. This is straight from the creators, and the implied authority, while an excellent reason in itself for taking a look at the book, pales in comparison to its other merits - brevity & clarity being foremost. This book is best appreciated if you already have some programming background - I say this from experience, since i knew Fortran 77 & Pascal before I learnt C, and the knowledge of Pascal, in particular,made it much easier for me to pick up C than classmates for whom it was the first programming language. Of course, if you're new to programming, you could still try learning from this, but it might be a bit of a struggle. If so, the books by Kelley & Pohl, K.N.King or Gottfried(Schaum series) may be useful for 'getting upto speed' with C first, and then coming to K & R. C is the one language which is both 'high level' and 'low level' at the same time - to date, it is the nearest to the ideal of a programming language that is easy enough in description to be followed by human readers, and at the same time close enough to the machine's language to be executed fast.There are faster languages, to be sure - assembly language is necessarily faster than any high level language. But just try coding a reasonably involved program in assembly, or even reading such an effort ! There are other languages which might be 'easier' for people to read, but they are slower(C++,Java,etc,etc). It is also the 'mother' of all modern biggies - C++ owes even its very name to C, Java was derived from C++, and Perl is **written** in C !! So knowing C would give you a better appreciation of the other languages as well. And it's still the language of choice for systems programming - so no systems programmer can afford to be a non-expert at C. Anyway, back to the book - and what a book it is! The authors are not just great programmers, they are outstanding writers as well. The book is just 274 pages, but it will teach you more than most thick 'tomes' on programming could ever possibly teach. And no, that doesn't imply that it's 'dense' or abtruse. The authors choose their words judiciously, and there is not a word out of place.The book is designed to make you think, for there is no better way of learning than to think things out for yourself. You may buy several other books for specialized purposes of particular projects, but when you want to get into the nitty-gritty, to clarify any elusive points, you'll return here, to 'the word of the law', as laid out by the creators of the language. Basically, if you program in C, you've just got have this book - and once you have it, you'll find it indispensable.Resources
About the Author
Brian Kernighan is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK stand for 'Kernighan'. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other programming languages, and on operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.Latest Offers
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